It didn't take any imagination to figure what that hollow tube was for. It was just the size to take one of the sticks of dynamite.
Doc went and got a bottle and passed it around as a sort of celebration and after a drink or two, he and Hutch shook hands and said there were no hard feelings. But I didn't pay much attention to that. They'd done it many times before and then been at one another's throats before the night was over.
Just why we were celebrating was hard to figure. Sure, we knew the machine fitted heads and that the dynamite fitted the machinebut we still had no idea what it was all about.
We were, to tell the truth, just a little scared, although you couldn't have gotten one of us to admit it. We did some guessing, naturally.
"It might be a mechanical doctor," said Hutch. "Just sit in that seat and put the helmet on your head and feed in the proper stick and you come out cured of whatever is wrong with you. It would be a blessing, I can tell you. You wouldn't ever need to worry if your doctor knew his business or not."
I thought Doc was going to jump right down Hutch's throat, but he must have remembered how they had shaken hands and he didn't do it.
"As long as you're thinking along that line," said Doc,"let's think a little bigger. Let's say it is a rejuvenation machine and the stick is crammed with vitamins and hormones and such that turn you young again. Just take the treatment every twenty years or so and you stay young forever."
"It might be an educator," Frost put in. "Those sticks might be packed full of knowledge. Maybe a complete college subject inside of each of them."
"Or it might be just the opposite," said Pancake. "Those sticks might soak up everything you know. Each of those sticks might be the story of one man's whole life."
"Why record life stories?" asked Hutch. "There aren't many men or aliens or what-not that have life stories important enough to rate all that trouble."
"If you're thinking of it being some sort of communications deal," I said, "it might be anything. It might be propaganda or religion or maps or it might be no more than a file of business records."
"And", said Hutch, "it might kill you deader than a mackerel."
"I don't think so," Doc replied. "There are easier ways to kill a person than to sit him in a chair and put a helmet on him. And it doesn't have to be a communicator."
"There's one way to find out," I said.
"I was afraid," said Doc, "we'd get around to that."
"It's too complicated," argued Hutch. "No telling what trouble it may get us into. Why not drop it cold? We can blast off and hunt for something simple."
"No!" shouted Frost. "We can't do that!"
"I'd like to know why not," said Hutch.
"Because we'd always wonder if we passed up the jackpot. We'd figure that maybe we gave up too quicka day or two too quick. That we got scared out. That if we'd gone ahead, we'd be rolling in money."
We knew Frost was right, but we batted it around some more before we would admit he was. All of us knew what we had to do, but there were no volunteers.
Finally we drew straws and Pancake was unlucky.
"Okay," I said. "First thing in the morning…"
"Morning, nothing!" wailed Pancake. "I want to get it over with. I wouldn't sleep a wink."
He was scared, all right, and he had a right to be. He felt just the way I would have if I'd drawn the shortest straw.
I didn't like barging around on an alien planet after dark, but we had to do it. It wouldn't have been fair to Pancake to have done otherwise. And, besides, we were all wrought up and we'd have no rest until we'd found out what we had.
So we got some flashes and went out to the silo. We tramped down the corridors for what seemed an endless time and came to the room where the machines were stored.
There didn't seem to be any difference in the machines, so we picked one at random. While Hutch got the helmet off, I adjusted the seat for Pancake and Doc went into an adjoining room to get a stick.
When we were all ready, Pancake sat down in the seat.
I had a sudden rush of imbecility. "Look," I said to Pancake, "you don't need to do this."
"Someone has to," said Pancake. "We got to find out somehow and this is the quickest way."
"I'll take your place."
Pancake called me a dirty name and he had no right to do that, for I was only being helpful. But I called him another and we were back to normal.
Hutch put the helmet on Pancake's head and it came down so far you couldn't see his face. Doc popped the stick into the tube and the machine purred a little, starting up, then settled into silence. Not exactly silence, eitherwhen you laid your ear against the jacket, you could hear it running.
Nothing seemed to happen to Pancake. He sat there cool and relaxed and Doc got to work on him at once, checking him over.
"His pulse has slowed a little," Doc reported, "and his heart action's sort of feeble, but he seems to be in no danger. His breathing is a little shallow, but not enough to worry about."
It might not have meant a thing to Doc, but it made the rest of us uneasy. We stood around and watched and nothing happened. I don't know what we thought might happen. Funny as it sounds, I had thought that something would.
Doc kept close watch, but Pancake got no worse.
We waited and we waited. The machine kept running and Pancake sat slumped in the seat. He was as limp as a dog asleep and when you picked up his hand, you'd think his bones had melted plumb away. All the time we got more nervous. Hutch wanted to jerk the helmet off Pancake, but I wouldn't let him.
No telling what might happen if we stopped the business in the middle.
It was about an hour after dawn that the machine stopped running. Pancake began to stir and we removed the helmet. He yawned and rubbed his eyes and sat up straight. He looked a bit surprised when he saw us and it seemed to take a moment for him to recognize us.
"What happened?" Hutch asked him.
Pancake didn't answer. You could see him pulling himself together, as if he were remembering and getting his bearings once again.
"I went on a trip," he said.
"A travelogue!" said Doc, disgusted.
"Not a travelogue. I was there. It was a planet, way out at the rim of the Galaxy, I think. There weren't many stars at night because it was so far outway out where the stars get thin and there aren't many of them. There was just a thin strip of light that moved overhead."
"Looking at the Galaxy edge on," said Frost, nodding. "Like you were looking at a buzz-saw's cutting edge."
"How long was I under?" asked Pancake.
"Long enough," I told him. "Six or seven hours. We were getting nervous."
"That's funny," said Pancake. "I'll swear I was there for a year or more."
"Now let's get this straight," Hutch said. "You say you were there. You mean you saw this place."
"I mean I was there!" yelled Pancake. "I lived with those people and I slept in their burrows and I talked with them and I worked with them. I got a blood blister on my hand from hoeing in a garden. I travelled from one place to another and I saw a lot of things and it was just as real as sitting here."
We bundled him out of there and went back to the ship.
Hutch wouldn't let Pancake get the breakfast. He threw it together himself and since Hutch is a lousy cook, it was a miserable meal. Doc dug up a bottle and gave Pancake a drink, but he wouldn't let any of the rest of us have any of it. Said it was medicinal, not social.
That's the way he is at times. Downright hog-selfish.
Pancake told us about this place he had been to. It didn't seem to have much, if any, government, mostly because it didn't seem to need one, but was a humble sort of planet where rather dim-witted people lived in a primitive agricultural state, They looked, he said, like a cross between a human and a groundhog, and he drew a picture of them, but it didn't help a lot, for Pancake is no artist.